


Probability in Eight Acts

by story_monger



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Movie: Fight The Future, Platonic Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:45:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3578343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quantum mechanics says that the Newtonian forces break down at certain sizes. Go small enough, and chance trumps predictability.</p><p>Scully thinks that meeting Mulder was like that. Descending from the world of Newtonian physics into the chaos of the quantum, where so little feels provable or conclusive. She can identify probable location of the electron but not the speed, and vice versa. God does, in fact, play dice with the universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Probability in Eight Acts

**Author's Note:**

> This is a highly unrealistic representation of survival in Antarctica, but then again Mulder and Scully are Main Characters, and are designed to survive unlikely situations

 

 

> _“I said, ‘How did we end up here?’_
> 
> _You said, ‘Happenstance.’_
> 
> _…_
> 
> _‘All that I mean is that_
> 
> _you and me_
> 
> _didn’t meet because of fate but rather probability.’”_
> 
> \- “Chemistry”
> 
> Kimya Dawson

 

**i.**

Wilkes Land is a wedge of eastern Antarctica tenuously owned by the Australians and extending from 100°31' E to 136°11' E. Its boundaries are Knox Land on one side and Claire Land on the other. Named after Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the American credited with discovering Antarctica—

“Eastern Antarctica?” Scully interrupts.

Mulder trudges a few more steps then shifts his head enough to catch sight of stringy red hair bumped up against his shoulder. Mom always nagged him and Sam about going outside in the winter with wet heads. Sometimes, at Oxford, Mulder would walk home with wet hair after working out at the pool. His hair was longer then; it would transform into hard little spikes within a few minutes.

“What?” Mulder says.

“Eastern Antarctica,” Scully repeats. Her voice croaks. “You don’t think about that. It’s Antarctica. It’s all south.”

“You stand on the coast of Wilkes Land, you look at the water, you’re looking at the Indian Ocean. East.”

“You ever think about if the world was flat?” Scully asks. “Imagine what we’d see.”

It’s the most talkative Scully’s been in the last hour, so Mulder takes it as a good sign. “That’s physically impossible,” he says. “Gravitational forces eventually turn any shape into a rough sphere. It’s science.” The head of stringy hair shifts, and Mulder is rewarded with a peek of a pale blue eye and a wrinkled eyebrow. Mulder beams back.

“Go back to talking about Wilkes Land,” Scully orders, dipping her head to bump into Mulder’s shoulder again. Mulder wants to check to see how the beginnings of frostbite on her face have developed, but he thinks that five minutes is too soon to start that argument again. Instead he lifts his head enough to squint at the landscape. He and Scully have been trying to keep their eyes hooded, keep their gazes on the safe navy and brown of their coats. Now, Mulder’s pupils throb as they struggle to dilate quickly enough to account for all the white. Maybe the truck will have sunglasses stashed in a compartment somewhere. Maybe they’ll actually find it. Maybe the gas tank will have filled all by itself, courtesy of the aliens.

“We on track?” Scully asks.

“We’re heading toward the right set of hills,” Mulder allows, dropping his head again and squinching his eyes shut. “I think.”

“My confidence is bolstered.”

Mulder huffs a laugh.

They walk another dozen paces. The last forty-five minutes, their whole function as living creatures has been to keep pacing. Slow, shaky steps maybe, but if they keep moving then survival is still a thing they can imagine.

“Wilkes Land?” Scully prompts when the thin sound of wind and snow gets to be too much.

“I think that’s all I know,” Mulder admits.

“Really?” Scully readjusts her grip around Mulder’s waist, tugs her hood lower. “Okay, what else were you researching on the ride over here?”

“Not researching much,” Mulder says. He watches his boots continually destroy the perfect, crispy sheet of the top layer of snow. Snow topsoil? The Inuit probably have a name for it. “Sleeping,” he adds. Lie. Blatant lie. Unless you define sleeping as staring at the seat in front of you and wondering how much you can destroy the lives of the people around you before they wise up enough to leave.

“Glad you had that much sense, then,” Scully says brusquely. “With a bullet graze in your skull.” Mulder can’t tell whether she’s being sarcastic.

Suddenly, Scully makes a low _hurk_ and she sags in a dead weight. Mulder drops to one knee, grasps her shoulders and helps her bend over the snow. “Okay, okay,” he breathes. “Okay.” Scully opens her mouth and violently expunges a glob of milky white, viscous material. Mulder would call it phlegm if he didn’t know any better. Scully’s next inhale is uneven and rattles the entirety of her narrow frame; Mulder can feel the seismic waves in his carpals. Her body seems to collapse inward as she gushes forth a thick stream of the fluid. It becomes darker; almost black. It’s chunky. Mulder moves one hand to sift through her hair, hold it back. Her hair is spiky and hard.

One more hard cough. One more spattering glob of phlegm-but-worse, (Mulder can’t manage to give real thought to what exactly Scully’s body is cleaning out from its tubes; his stomach is already squirming as is) and Scully sags with a thready groan.

“Okay,” Mulder says again. He scoots them away from the solidifying pile of refuse and lets his other knee sink into the snow. He collects Scully in bone-weary arms (too little of her and simultaneously too much; Mulder has no idea how she does it) and holds her so that her face is protected in his chest. He bows over her and breathes.

Scully remains motionless for several minutes, save the way she drags in breaths like they pain her. Mulder tucks his face down close to hers, so that the little heat in his exhales might reach her.

“’m fine,” Scully croaks after a time. It doesn’t tell Mulder anything, because Dana Scully, M.D., says she’s fine when she’s got a tumor lodged in her brain. But her voice sounds strong enough for Mulder to decide that this episode is not different from its three or four predecessors.

When Scully rises several minutes later, Mulder can already feel his core temperature dropping. He recognizes in a distant way how terrifying that is.

“It’ll be warmer in the truck,” Mulder says absently as he braces an arm around Scully and simultaneously rests some of his weight on her thin, strong shoulder. He hadn’t meant to do it earlier, but at some point he realized that Scully had maneuvered them into it. His head has been swimming the last few hours; his muscles are sluggish, and he can’t afford to turn down her offer. He hates himself for it.

Scully doesn’t give any answer to Mulder’s proclamation. Mulder can’t say whether she believes him. He’s not inclined to believe it himself. But he’s the one in this partnership who spouts theories with shaky evidence. So.

They start walking again, toward the stark black hints of hills. The sky has dimmed, and the snow is starting to take on a blueish tinge. Mulder remembers that he lost his flashlight.

* * *

 

**ii.**

Scully still recalls the first time she learned about quantum mechanics. She’d been in her senior year of high school, reading a physics textbook that her teacher had let her borrow. The quantum mechanics section took up the last few pages of the book. After chapters full of staid principles like gravitational force and electromagnetic energy, the physics of the subatomic seemed downright anarchist. The Newtonian forces break down at certain sizes, the book told Scully. Go small enough, and chance trumps predictability.

She thinks that meeting Mulder was like that. Descending from the world of Newtonian physics into the chaos of the quantum, where so little feels provable or conclusive. She can identify probable location of the electron but not the speed, and vice versa. God does, in fact, play dice with the universe.

She’s thinking about that when she says, “I’m not saying there isn’t a _chance_ that I had an extraterrestrial virus. But I don’t see it as highly probable.”

“Doesn’t matter whether it’s probable, Scully, only that it’s a possible explanation that has evidence to support it.”

“I can’t…I’d need to run tests.”

“Great.” Mulder peers into Scully’s face. She can see his eyes flicking to the spots on her cheeks that have felt numb the past several hours. “Let’s get the centrifuge set up,” he says. “I’ll go grab the electrophoresis gel.”

Scully feels a grin climbing into her mouth. This is typical. They’re both going to freeze to death at the bottom of the world and they’re going to do it arguing about aliens. They haven’t even gotten started on the spaceship yet, although Scully already sees where that discussion will go. She’ll patiently explain that, crater aside, she didn’t see anything, and Mulder will simmer with frustration that she had the bad luck to not lift her head at the right time. He ought to be used to it, as deep as he is in this world of abductions and conspiracies. Chance trumps predictability here.

They’re sitting in the lee of the dark hills they’d been aiming toward the last several hours. They were lucky; they managed to crest the hills before dark fell. They only suffered about an hour of fumbling downhill in dim light before they found an acceptable crevice in which to cram themselves. The worst of the wind passes over them, and the tight walls of rock keep their heat more or less in one place. They could be doing worse.

“What season is it down here? Spring?” Scully asks. She’s not in the mood to keep talking circles around alien viruses. “How long do the nights last?”

“There’s night, and then there’s twilights,” Mulder sighs. He shifts, and the nylon of his coat rasps. “I don’t know for sure,” he adds. “We’ll wait until we can see enough to start moving again.”

They’re leaned against a slope of rock and snow in the crevice, curled into one another like two commas. Mulder has his head resting in the hollow of Scully’s neck, one of his arms twined up to reach around her back. Scully has her hands resting on the back of Mulder’s head and neck. She kneads the muscle there without thinking about it.

“Get some sleep, then,” Scully says. “I’ll wake you up in a few hours.” She can feel the shift of muscles beneath her hands that means Mulder has opened his mouth and is about to protest. “I’ve been spending the last day or two knocked out,” she cuts in. “And you’ve got a concussion and are running on…who knows how much sleep, but I know it’s too little.” She smooths down his hair that, she’s pleased to find, is finally melting back into softness. “I’m fine, Mulder.”

Mulder heaves a sigh that makes his ribs press into her shins. “Sure, doc,” he tosses out. Scully scratches lightly at his scalp as he buries his face further into her, curls his body up tighter around her like he thinks there’s some sin in them not making as much physical contact as possible. Scully still wonders where that trait came from.

Scully tucks in her chin and rests her mouth on the crown of his head. The warm smell of his body counteracts the musky, metallic bile lingering on the palate of her mouth. She wonders what she’d find if she did a complete analysis of that mucousy substance she’d coughed up. Something disturbing, she’s willing to bet.

“You need to upchuck again,” Mulder says, as if catching the drift of her thoughts, “try to aim away from my face.”

“You touch sticky, unknown substances all the time,” Scully murmurs.

“And?”

“Go to sleep, Mulder.”

Mulder shifts one more time, exhales a thin sigh, and falls still. Scully listens to the wind and thinks about how outside of time and place she feels right now, and how painfully familiar the cadence of Mulder’s breathing is in counterpoint.

* * *

 

**iii.**

Mulder doesn’t plan to sleep, but he suspects that his body has been waiting for its chance. He’s out like a light almost immediately, and he doesn’t dream a whit.

When he peels his eyes open it feels like he just closed them. But the wind’s howling has changed key and the light pooling into their shallow cave hadn’t been there before. It’s a still, gray sort of light, but Mulder thinks it will be enough to walk by.

Mulder shifts ever so slightly and hisses. His extremities are barely present as far as body heat is concerned. Mulder starts to wriggle his toes and clench and unclench his hands. Somewhere above him, Scully makes a low hum. He feels it in his skull. A hand lands on his temple.

“Okay?” Scully asks.

“Mm hm,” Mulder grunts. His hands and feet start to prickle. “Hey Scully? You know if they make prosthetic toes?”

“Sure,” Scully murmurs. He can’t see her, but her voice sounds slow and thick. “I’ve seen them. You pop them onto your feet like slippers.”

“I’ll get some flame decals on mine.”

A beat of silence.

“Do you—?”

Mulder tilts his head and finds Scully staring down at him with a pinched, wide-eyed expression.

“Not yet, but it doesn’t hurt to plan this out,” Mulder says. Scully deflates, and the expression shifts into the much more familiar ‘my partner is an actual ten-year-old and I am the babysitter’ arrangement. “I got you good,” Mulder adds.

“We’ll be lucky if the worst that happens is we lose a few toes,” Scully says. She says it the same way she recites causes of death and decomposition rates. Just a statement of fact, sir, no need to get emotional. It’s almost worse than if she’d sounded blatantly angry. Probably Scully knows that.

Mulder drops his eyes back down to where his hands open and close sluggishly. “How long was I out?” he asks.

“A couple of hours at least.” Scully shifts her hips and slides down a little. “I was dozing in and out, to be honest.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Nothing’s really going to get us out here expect the cold,” Mulder says. Scully doesn’t reply, and Mulder is tempted to lift his head again so he can find her expression.

“Mulder,” Scully says. “Who knows that we’re out here?”

“Skinner,” Mulder says. “The Gunmen.”

“Did you give them the coordinates?”

“No, I thought it might be too risky. But they know the area I’m in. They know where to start.”

“Hm.” Scully doesn’t sound thrilled at this. “Anyone else?”

“I guess technically the guys at the base where I stole that truck.”

“Stole?”

“Did I say stole? I mean borrowed.” Mulder gnaws at his bottom lip. “People are looking for us,” he says.

“Just hope they know where to look,” Scully murmurs. “Hope it’s the right people who find us.” Scully heaves a sigh. “We should keep moving,” she says. For a split second, Mulder considers the possibility that they go back to sleep and don’t bother to wake. _We stop fighting, then they win_ , he remembers himself saying. But stiff and concussed and somewhere in Antarctica, the sentiment sounds threadbare. _Fine, then Scully doesn’t deserve this,_ he thinks with a flush of annoyance. _She deserves to walk away. Not to get killed because she had to bad luck of being your partner._

Mulder gives his fingers one more flex then painfully props himself on one elbow. The hollows between him and Scully where they had managed to cultivate some warmth disappear in a breath of wind. Scully flinches and Mulder can almost hear the groan she bites back. She needs more layers of clothing.

“I’m going to try to pee,” he says in a low voice. “I might lose my manhood in the process. Wish me luck.”

Scully snorts tiredly. Mulder almost scolds her that this isn’t a laughing matter, but then he actually thinks about it. Honestly, what else can they do but laugh at this point?

Walking is a long, rolling muscle spasm that doesn’t want to happen. Mulder grinds his molars together so hard that he feels their roots as he gropes and stumbles out of the hollow and into wind. The gray light makes the sky and ground hard to tell apart. Mulder rolls his ankles a few times, trips over rocks, then finally finds a place to relieve himself. It’s about as miserable as he imagined, but he does get to keep all his equipment. He notes the color of his urine: a dark yellow that probably isn’t ideal but doesn’t look dangerous yet. He’s heard of brown urine. No telling how long before that shows up.

“Is it true that eating snow is actually dehydrating?” Mulder asks when he stumbles back.

Scully is standing in front of the hollow. Her hands hang at her sides and her feet are braced on a small outcrop as she gazes down the hill. She is perfectly silhouetted against a sky so monochromatic that it’s dizzying, and she could be a symbol in a Russian novel with her pale, frost-bitten face against the blue of her eyes and the copper of her hair. She looks like living and death all at once.

“Yes,” Scully says without looking at him. “Because of the energy needed to melt the snow.” She points down the slope. “We might be lucky, though,” she says. “I found the truck.”

* * *

 

**iv.**

They don’t talk nearly as much on their journey to the yellow blob that represents the snow truck. Scully can’t say that they’ve run out of things to talk about, because they’ve chatted away entire cross-country plane rides before. They’ve also spent equally lengthy trips sitting in smooth, companionable silence, but Scully doesn’t think that’s what’s happening here either. She supposes that they’re hungry and exhausted. Even if the sleep has given them a boost, both have every reason to be in a hospital right now, and instead they’re asking their bodies to trek through subzero temperatures.

Scully suspects they’re both considering the harsh fact that the truck is a blessing and a dead end. The plan to find the truck had been a good one; well-grounded. But the gas tank is empty and other than a shelter and a potential source for some fresh supplies, the truck’s not an answer to their problems. Scully wonders whether it’s too much to hope the tread tracks are still intact. Theoretically they could follow them all the way back to the base. Practically, she’s not willing to bet on it.

“Can we stop?” His voice comes thin. Scully, who is a few paces ahead, turns around and finds Mulder with his head bowed and his hands on his thighs. She wonders how long he held out before speaking.

“Okay?” she asks. He gives a half shrug. Scully’s own breathing whooshes around her, amplified by the hood of her coat. Beyond that, thin wind. And beyond that, the kind of silence that people write horror stories about. Scully twists around again and can see the truck on the horizon; it’s about as large as her extended hand.

“We’re getting there,” she calls back encouragingly. Mulder nods once, his gaze still directed down. Scully has to ignore the shot of adrenaline in her gut as she slogs back toward him. “Hey,” she breathes when she draws near. “Hey, Mulder, look at me.”

She tilts his chin up and uses numb fingers to part his pale blue eyelids. It’s hard to tell much in this dim twilight zone, but she thinks that his pupils dilate sluggishly if at all. She runs a hand through his hair and probes at his head wound. Mulder grunts.

“Sorry,” Scully says. She lets her hand slide back down the side of his face; her fingers rest briefly near his mouth and she can compare the pale lavender of her cuticles and his lips. Mulder watches her with a glazed expression.

In another spike of adrenaline, she reaches out and gathers him to her, guides his forehead to rest on her shoulder. Scully came to terms with her height back in college, but it’s at times like this that she wishes for a few more inches. She could carry Mulder better that way.

“Sorry,” Mulder breathes.

“Shh,” Scully scolds. “We have time.” All the time in the world. They could probably spend an eternity out here, falling into the end and never finding the bottom of it.

(It’s easy to have these kinds of thoughts in a gray twilight zone composed solely of snow, sky and rock. The human psyche was never designed for this landscape.)

Mulder heaves a sigh, presses his forehead into her shoulder hard, then lifts his head. Scully follows his face as it rises above her. The edge of his mouth twists up. He must have seen something amusing.

“I’ll make it,” he says.

“I know.” Scully loops Mulder’s arm over her shoulder and nudges them into movement again. He leans more weight on her than he did yesterday. The truck is still as big as an outstretched hand, but then, Scully’s hands aren’t very big.

***

When they reach the truck, Scully has a sudden vision that it’s locked and Mulder lost the keys somewhere in the…that place.

“Nah,” Mulder says, popping open the door. “C’mon, Scully, does that sound like something I’d think to do?” His words trip over one another slightly, but she can tell the truck has made him almost cheerful.

“No,” Scully admits. She watches Mulder slowly crawl into the truck. She then glances around out of habit, as if she’ll spot suspicious people in suits hiding behind newspapers.

“Yahtzee,” Mulder’s voice drifts from the truck. Scully turns in time to see him stick his head back out. “A stove and food,” he says. “And I think some clothes too. Leave it to the military.”

“You stole this from a _military_ base?” she asks.

“Borrowed.” Mulder leans back and peers into the truck again. “Not tons,” he says. “Might last us a few days if we ration it well.”

“Okay.” Scully hikes toward the truck. “You lie down. I’ll sort out what we have.”

“I’m fine,” Mulder says. Scully shoves his shoulder, and he slides back into the truck.

“Lie down,” she repeats.

“You’re the one who didn’t sleep,” he says.

“I slept.” Scully keeps batting Mulder back until he retreats to the passenger seat, though his expression is mulish. “Do I need to remind you that you have a serious concussion?” she asks.

“Great. And you were infected with an unknown virus.”

“I haven’t vomited recently.” Scully scrambles to the back, where she can see an open locker. “I’m a doctor,” she adds.

“Yeah, doctor,” Mulder kicks the seat and makes it rattle. She gives him a look, then crouches down to inspect the locker’s contents. She first finds a small stove and pot for melting snow. Aluminum-wrapped packages seem to promise food—probably something like high-fat, high-protein bars. Beneath those, Scully digs out two thick blankets, extra coats, and a packet of hand warmers.

“Here.” She tosses one of the blankets and the warmers over the seat. Mulder makes a muffled, pleased sound.

“Any chance of a sleeping bag?” he calls out. Scully takes a minute, then she ducks her head and has to press her lips together.

“Not your lucky day,” she replies. What she wouldn’t give to be in a balmy Florida wetland, though. Scully shoves that thought aside and focuses on laying out the aluminum packages, popping open the stove set, and planning out the next few days of survival.

* * *

 

**v.**

Mulder stares at the perfect blue-gray of the sky through the truck’s window while Scully shuffles around behind the seat. He can feel his eyelids sinking again, dangerously so now that he’s horizontal. His breathing has finally evened out, and the sharp pain in his skull has retreated to a low roar.

The seat shakes as Scully clambers back into the front, and Mulder peels his eyelids open to study her through his lashes. She has more color; a slight tinge of pink on her cheeks. The small, enclosed space of the truck’s cab is making the air temperature downright bearable.

“Here,” she says, and holds out a small plastic cup. Mulder props himself on one elbow to accept it. It’s water. Liquid, clear, honest to god water. Still lukewarm from being melted. Mulder swallows it around a high, embarrassing sound of relief. Scully takes the cup from his fingers almost as soon as it’s empty and refills it from the pot she brought with her. She takes a long draught, refills, then delivers another cupful to Mulder. They continue this small dance for some indeterminate amount of time, until Mulder’s lips don’t feel so deeply cracked and his tongue no longer sticks to the roof of his mouth. He watches dazedly as Scully stows the cup and pot and digs through her pockets. Her hand emerges holding a shiny aluminum package.

“Dinner,” Scully says as she tears the package open. Something spackled brown falls into her lap, and Scully picks it up to sniff at it experimentally. Mulder watches her take a small, fastidious bite.

“Be funny, wouldn’t it?” he says around a thick tongue. “If we died of food poisoning out here.”

“Sure,” Scully gives him a side-eye. She takes a second, larger bite then passes the bar over to him. “Botulism flavored.”

Mulder sluggishly lifts his hand to accept the food. He brings it near his mouth, and almost immediately his salivary glands start working in overtime. His brain had been doing him the favor of putting his body into starvation mode, but now his stomach cramps up in anticipation of something other than snow. He takes a large bite. “This is oaty glue,” he says after a moment. It’s still fucking delicious.

“It’s almost pure fat and protein,” Scully replies. She’s squinting at the wrapper. “About 500 calories in one bar.”

“Going to ruin my girlish figure,” Mulder murmurs, allowing himself another bite. He holds it out to Scully to finish.

“I’m fine,” Scully shakes her head.

“You—“

“If I just throw it back up, then it’s a complete waste,” Scully cuts in. “I’m going to work myself up; I don’t trust my body enough to put too much food into it.”

“There’s two bites here,” Mulder says. “Maybe three. Jesus Christ, Scully, stop martyring.”

Scully blinks at him, blue eyes hard. Mulder relents and breaks of as small a chunk as he dares. He lets the food linger on his tongue as he hands Scully the rest of the bar. He plops his head back onto the seat and blinks heavily at the truck’s battered ceiling. The oaty glue texture fills his mouth and it’s the best thing he’s had in his life.

“Y’know, we’re just animals,” he says into the warm silence of the truck’s cab. “For all our lording around with technology and…and clear cutting rain forests. Our priorities are still getting food and water in one end and fucking with the other.”

“Poetic,” Scully’s voice drifts over to him. “You must be feeling better.” The leather of the seat groans, and Mulder lifts his head enough to see that Scully has drawn her knees up to her chest as she nibbles on the remains of the energy bar. Her hair is stringy and disheveled, her expression solemn, and Mulder finds the term ‘childish’ springing to mind. He’s so rarely in his life had cause to think of Scully as childish, and it makes his diaphragm bounce with a few aborted laughs. Scully cuts her gaze over to him, lifts her eyebrows, then probably decides it’s not worth asking.

“I like the theory that humans are just domesticated by plants,” she says.

Mulder blinks hazily at her. “What?”

“Yeah, we’re perfect propagators of plants. Agricultural crops, to be precise. They manipulate us by giving us food and we spread them across acres and acres of land.”

“I don’t…okay.” Mulder lets his head come back down. “That’s it then,” he says.

“What’s it?”

“Forget Smoking Man, it’s the corn that’s been behind this all along.” He hears a snort.

“We’ll get the Gunmen to do a piece on it,” Scully says.

Mulder doesn’t answer; he rests one hand on his stomach and stares into the strange geometry of the cab’s ceiling and the chunk of sky. It’s the last thing he sees before he lets his lids shut again.

***

Mulder floats in and out of consciousness. Most of the time, when he opens his eyes, the sky is visible and Scully is a warm weight draped over his chest and legs. Once, the weight is gone and instead he hears a clatter of metal and plastic and feels a blast of cold air. He just comes around to the notion that he ought to find Scully when she reappears as if by magic, and he sinks back onto sleep with a shuddering sigh and her face burrowing into his neck.

Once, the sky is a dark navy and he hears small hitching sounds. He brings up a hand and finds damp skin.

“Scully?” he manages.

“I couldn’t keep it down,” she rasps. “I couldn’t keep it down.”

Mulder exhales, then turns his head until his lips find her forehead.

* * *

 

**vi.**

Scully sits in a boardroom and rattles dice in her hand. They make a precise clacking sound when she tosses them across the hardwood table, and she is reminded of the knuckle bones seers and shamans use to read the future.

“Double,” says a voice on the other end of the boardroom. It is Duane Barry. She looks up. It is the Smoking Man. The man who is both Barry and the Smoking Man grins. He has yellow teeth. “Try again,” he says.

Scully scoops up the two dice and shakes them in her loosely caged hand. She can feel something sticky on her palm and between her fingers, and when she rolls again, she sees poppy red smeared across the bone white of the dice and pooling in the lines of her palm.

“Double again,” says the man who has settled into the Smoking Man, but now Scully cannot see where he is. “You are very good at this,” he says in a nowhere voice. Scully studies the dice and the trail of red they have left across the table. She slowly scoops them back up and looks into the room. No one tells her to try one more time. She stashes the dice into her coat pocket and flees the boardroom.

She runs into the basement office and is thrust into a stinking cloud of charred paper. Mulder sits hunch-backed among the carnage and sifts his fingers through soft, peeling ash. Scully walks toward him and he lifts his head and says, “Look what you found.”

“They didn’t say,” Scully replies.

“It’s not,” he says. He ducks his head again, and Scully leaves.

She is in a neat, long hallway with olive green doors one either side. Behind those doors are a million small Emilys. They have all been aborted and Scully lost the dice somewhere, so she can’t see whether they deserve to be saved. Scully walks down the hallway and sheds little vials of crimson blood from her suit and coat.

“Not yours,” says someone behind her. It is a man who Scully recognizes but does not know. She is on a bed and she stares into a blinding light. The man is above her, and he rattles dice in his hands. “You can’t play anymore,” he says. He tosses the dice and Scully splits open.

***

When Scully floats awake, the sky is back to a boisterous blue and the light streaming through the fogged window is almost painful. Scully grunts and buries her face back into the warm space between Mulder’s chest and the back of the seat, tugging the blankets up over her head. Scully’s mouth feels fuzzy and acidic. It’s a reminder that she spent what felt like hours hunched over the snow, her mouth hanging open and tears streaming down her cheeks. Mulder would tell her that it was only to be expected, that her body had been briefly hijacked to gestate…but Scully can’t think about that now. She’s been forced to accept enough violations to her body; she doesn’t want to accept this one too, not something this visceral. Not unless she has to.

Scully releases a small groan and shifts her head so that she’s looking at the underside of Mulder’s face. His eyes are open. As if he feels her realization, he shifts his head and blinks down at her.

They don’t speak. It’s not the first time Scully remembers them doing this: watching one another like they’re trying to have a whole conversation without the buffer of words.

“You feeling better?” Mulder breaks the silence first. Scully bites at her bottom lip before she answers.

“I’m not nauseous right now,” she says. “My skin is a little clammy. Slight headache, but that’s probably just from the dehydration.”

“Should drink.”

“I did.”

They lapse back into silence Scully feels as if the next words to be said hang between them, and now it’s just a game of who’s willing to snatch them up first.  Mulder’s hand comes up, sifts into her hair. His expression is drawn, and Scully understands him. She curls up her knees a little more and rattles out a long, loud sigh. They can wait. They’re suspended out here, remember? Time speeds them toward the inevitable end, and they’ll never quite reach it, and they’ll float in the cold, white, in between space instead.

***

When they move again, it’s so they can allow themselves another drink from the pot of water. They sit cross-legged next to each other on the seat and pass the plastic cup back and forth. The landscape before them is breathtaking, if only because of its sheer simplicity. Scully stares at it over the rim of the cup and can feel her pupils aching from the albedo.

“You want to imagine what sorts of things are buried under all that?” Mulder asks from her right. She hands the cup over.

“Fossils?” she ventures. “Preserved specimen?”

“Sure,” Mulder says. He glances at her. “Preserved specimen.”

Scully bends one leg up against her chest and rests her elbow on it. “You know, I’m not saying that wherever they had me, whatever they put in me, wasn’t…I just need to hang this on something tangible.” She looks over. “You know that, don’t you?”

Mulder hands her the empty cup. “I know,” he says. “It’s why I keep you around, remember?” Scully accepts the cup and contemplates its innards.

“How long did you take to drive to this point?” she asks.

“Several hours,” he says. “Keeping up a good clip.” He toys with the edge of a blanket, rolling it between his fingers. “Maybe we could do it.”

“Maybe we’re safer staying in here,” Scully says. “More likely someone would spot a truck, isn’t it? And then we wouldn’t have to expose ourselves to the elements.”

“Maybe,” Mulder echoes. A long breath of silence. “I don’t like the idea of being sitting ducks for whoever gets to us first.”

Chance. Possibilities and unknowns. Scully’s properly sick of it.

“I know.” Scully reaches out and captures one of Mulder’s hands. The skin is dry and taut; cold but manageably so. They’d survive in here for a few days. They’d eat sparingly, talk a little, sleep mostly. Maybe one day they’d just not wake up, and someone would find their bodies in a few days, a few weeks, a few months, quietly dispose of them, contact family. Scully realizes that she wants to stay here so her mother will have a body to bury.

Scully inhales suddenly and squeezes Mulder’s hand before releasing it. “So, what do we do?” she asks.

Mulder shakes his head ever so slightly. “I’m not.” He pauses and pulls at his mouth. “I can’t trust my judgment anymore. My decisions led us here. My…my obsession with the truth. Whatever that is.” Scully stares hard at the side of his face. “I’m the one they’re trying to stop and it’s my fault they’ve taken you and…and hurt you again and—“

“Mulder,” Scully interrupts. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He blinks over at her, and Scully feels a true tinge of annoyance.

“Mulder,” she says, straightening. “You really think I couldn’t have left all this behind years ago?” She shakes her head. “After I was abducted…you don’t want to hear about all the conversations I had with well-meaning people who hold a lot of sway in my life, all telling me that things had crossed a line.” Her voice is climbing in volume; Mulder is still staring. “But I had an obligation to myself to figure out what they had done to me. _I_ made that choice for _me_. And I know that you and all those men behind the curtain think that kidnapping and…and _violating_ me is all just a big ploy to get to Fox Mulder, but none of you seem to understand that I stepped in that firing range in the first place. I knew what the consequences were, and I placed myself there because I want the truth as much as you do. At this point, I deserve the truth.”

The words come to a stumbling halt then. She closes her mouth and realizes with a start how heavily she’s breathing. Mulder is perfectly silhouetted against the sharp blue of the sky, and Scully can’t get a good reading of his expression.

The silence drags on long enough that Scully blurts out, “And if I could storm away without freezing to death, I’d be doing it right now.” God. She’s starting to absorb Mulder’s personality.

Mulder drops his head suddenly, and it’s not until she spots his shoulders shaking that she realizes he’s laughing. She watches him for several seconds and tries to decide what she’s supposed to do now. She doesn’t go off on enough rants for her to have a habit.

“Okay,” Mulder says at last. He straightens, and he looks tired and amused all at once. “Okay,” he repeats. “You’re right. I’ve been an ass.”

“I didn’t say that,” Scully starts uncertainly.

“Yes you did,” Mulder shoots back. A handful of half-laughs, half-sighs trip out, and he leans back in the seat scrubbing at his face. “I know,” he says in a softer voice. “I know and I just…sometimes I’m not sure why you’d choose this. Why anybody would choose this.”

“And you didn’t get to choose?” Scully asks softly.

“What was my option? Ignore what I saw the night Samantha disappeared? Never try to find out what happened to her?”

“Yes,” Scully says. “Other people would have done that. Other people have done that.” Mulder lifts his head slightly, looks at her with one weary eye. “But you didn’t, and that says something.”

“Giving me some whiplash here, Scully.” Mulder runs a hand through his hair, leans forward slightly, and Scully is struck—as she sometimes is—by his sheer boyishness. She wonders sometime whether he’s held part of his child-self intact in remembrance of Samantha. Whether that part of him is waiting for her to come back.

“There was a giant crater,” Mulder says in a low voice, and it takes Scully several blank seconds to understand what he’s talking about.

“Yes,” she agrees. “Yes, we were in a massive aircraft buried under the snow. That’s not the question here, Mulder.”

“Just whether it was aliens who built it.” Mulder shakes his head. “If you’d been able to see it. It was too big, too complex even for the military. It was…” he putters his lips. “It was otherworldly.” He looks over at her properly. Scully looks back and is swept under a wave of sudden tiredness.

“I wish I saw it,” she says. “I really do.”

“Yeah,” Mulder says in an exhale. He shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe it doesn’t matter, though.”

“No, c’mon, we’re not going to think like that.” Scully reaches out to fuss at a clump of hair hanging into Mulder’s eyes. “We were deciding whether to stay or go, weren’t we? Let’s circle back to that.”

“Wanna flip a coin?” Mulder asks.

“No,” Scully says immediately. She rolls in her lips before continuing. “Let’s stay here another day, maybe two. Then after that, we’ll start walking.”

“All right,” Mulder says, leaning back into the seat.

“All right?” Scully parrots. “No objection?”

“What other options do you want me to give?” Mulder asks. Scully has to acquiesce this point. She realizes that she feels something settle inside her in view of an actual plan. Here on out, they’ll at least have decided how they die.

“Scully?” Mulder is looking out the windshield now, and he’s silhouetted beautifully again. “I do hear you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Scully leans back so she’s mirroring Mulder. “I know,” she says.

* * *

 

**vii.**

Mulder watches three days pass through heavy lids and a cloud of malaise. He and Scully spend most of their time in various levels of sleep. They mete out water and the oaty glue energy bars. They talk in low voices around stiff lips. Usually they stop talking and listen to one another breathe and then slip into fretful dreams.

When he’s awake, Mulder thinks in slow, ponderous circles. Bees, corn, alien spacecraft. His mother, Samantha, the way Scully looked when he leaned down to try her lips. He’s still bitter about that one.

On the third day, when they’ve passed their self-imposed limit but have yet to rouse themselves to the concept of leaving the truck, Mulder is stretched out in the back next to the locker. Scully lies unseen on the front seat. He breaks the silence almost without thinking.

“Scully,” he says. “If we don’t get out of this, I just want you to know—”

“Oh brother,” Scully says. Mulder’s face flies into a wide grin.

“Don’t you want to hear my final confessions?” he asks.

“Not with that kind of delivery,” she says. “You sound like Keith Hanson.”

“Is that someone I should know?” Mulder asks. He rolls onto his back and crosses his hands beneath his head. “Who’s Keith?”

“Some guy I knew.”

“From where? Quantico? Med school?”

“University of Maryland.”

“Undergrad Scully,” Mulder muses. “I’d give money to see you in some closet-sized dorm room with a roommate named Mackenzie.” (They haven’t talked this much in days. Mulder wonders whether to be wary.)

“Her name was Heather,” Scully says. He can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “And we got along very well.”

“Sorry, I digress,” Mulder says. “Who was Keith?”

“Some kid living on the floor below ours. He told me that he loved me several times in as dramatic ways as possible. It was annoying.”

“Sounds romantic.” Mulder has to grin again when he imagines a smaller, round-faced Scully giving that exasperated expression to freshman boys.

The leather of the seat groans again, and when Mulder glances up he sees the matted copper of Scully’s hair. Her eyes follow a moment later. “Mulder,” she says. “We said we’d start walking now, didn’t we?”

Mulder rolls his head slightly, can feel the hard floor against the uneven planes of his skull. “Yeah,” he agrees.

A long pause. “If you want to stay,” Scully finally says. “I’ll stay.”

Mulder exhales. “No, let’s see this through.” They watch one another, and although Mulder doesn’t think they’re necessarily stalling, he wonders whether this is them saying goodbye, just to get it out of the way.

***

They wait until the sun is at its highest. They collect the food and pack the little stove. They partition out the extra clothing that Scully found folded at the bottom of the locker. It will be enough cover to give them a chance.

Mulder opens the truck door and yelps at the blast of cold air. They climb out slowly, all stiff joints and sluggish reactions. Mulder almost considers suggesting they climb back inside, but he bites back the words before they spill out.

Scully pats the truck like it’s a faithful horse. They point themselves to the horizon and once again they start to walk.

***

It would be a waste of time to catalogue the next set of hours in any detail.

Know that Mulder watches the sky dim and recognizes that this time he and Scully are out in the open. No convenient hills in which to take shelter. At one point he lifts his arm and she slides under it without protest.

Know that Mulder glances at her more and more. Looking for something, he supposes. Sometimes she raises her eyes, and her lips lift at their edges, and Mulder’s chest aches.

Know that, when the sun is properly gone, Scully pulls out the last two energy bars, and they have a final feast: a whole bar each. They eat them while still walking because pausing is too dangerous.

Know that Mulder walks until he knows for sure that his toes are gone, and then he stops and says Scully’s name in a cracking voice. Scully looks around them. The land is open and vast; the night is firmly here. It’s as good a place as any.

***

Scully builds up a small buttress of snow against the wind, and it’s such a hopeful thing to do, and Mulder loves her for it. They lay down behind it, curled up in the way that’s familiar by now.

“Wanna spill final regrets now?” Mulder asks. He can barely force the words past blue, bleeding lips.

“Shh,” Scully replies. She examines his lips briefly, like at this point her medical opinion can still save them. She moves her attention up, and he tries to convey a smile with his eyes. She tilts her head, then leans forward and captures his mouth in hers. Even her tongue is cold, and the contact makes his lips sting. Mulder gives back as much as he can manage, then sighs when they pull away.

“Wanted to get that one out of the way,” Scully whispers.

“Fuckin’ bees,” Mulder says. He wonders whether he ought to stop there and let that stand as his final words. It has a certain existential appeal. Scully presses another kiss to his brow then huddles tighter against him. He tucks his nose into her hair and closes his eyes and waits.

* * *

 

**viii.**

Scully stands on a wide, green hill, in the park where she used to play as a child. It’s spring, and white clover flowers bob in a warm, wet breeze. She used to make crowns and bracelets out of these flowers. She moves a hand to reach out to them, but she realizes her palm is already full with two ivory dice. She flattens her hand and watches them shift and clink dully in her palm.

“It’s not chance, it’s plain probability,” Mulder says beside her. “It _can_ happen, so at some point it’s _going_ to, given enough opportunities. And the universe nothing if not full of opportunities.”

“Still, the likelihood for certain outcomes is vanishingly small,” Scully replies.

“Doesn’t mean we dismiss an event just because it falls outside of likelihood.”                                  

“That’s your opinion?” Scully asks him. She glances up and raises her eyebrows.

He smiles back. “Take a look at us. One in five billion shot, and we made it.”

Scully looks at the dice one more time then tosses them into the thick, emerald grass. They are swallowed up by clover. Scully finds Mulder’s hand and clasps it in her own. They watch clouds roll across the sky. Thunder crescendoes over them. Rain is coming soon.


End file.
